Information often leads to knowledge, which, when used properly, can become the foundation for personal and collective empowerment. Autocrats restrict the free flow of information as a means of maintaining control over the people.
While he often proclaims to be a defender of free speech, President Donald Trump’s actions betray his words. And to many of his defenders, the right to free speech is unimportant since the words and actions of their leader override all else.
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In the video, “God Made Trump,” created by the Dilley Meme Team, which supported Trump during the election, an unidentified narrator states emphatically: “God looked down on his planned Paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.”
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At his rallies, we see his supporters wearing red hats inscribed with: “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.”
Trump, who by all indications was never a truly religious man and only feigns a certain religiosity. Yet, while standing on a podium in a Florida convention center on the night of the election, he proclaimed: “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason, and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.”
During an interview on National Public Radio, Robert Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, placed the religious personage of Donald Trump into biblical perspective and not as God, but rather, as the Persian king Cyrus, a flawed but inspirational figure.
“We see this presentation of Trump as a kind of messiah figure,” Jones explained, “but it’s notable that it’s not really Jesus that we’re getting the comparison to but… the one you hear in evangelical circles more often is a comparison to, like, the Persian king Cyrus from the Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible.”
Jones explained that Cyrus was a flawed human being “presented as an ungodly king who nonetheless frees a group of Jews who are held captive in Babylon.” Like Cyrus, Jones stated that Trump “is the powerful, strong, authoritarian liberator, someone who by definition and maybe even by necessity is even above the law and who alone is capable of liberating conservative, white Christians from their oppressors.”
Last year, on the Christian show FlashPoint, TV evangelist Hank Kunneman described “a battle between good and evil,” adding, “There’s something on President Trump that the enemy fears: it’s called the anointing.”
So for many of his followers, Trump’s alleged and proven transgressions do not dissuade them from their belief in his powers to liberate them, these white Christians, from their burdens. In their minds, they are the ones most oppressed.
As such, conservative white Christians embrace the Trump administration’s attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Many of them misunderstand DEI as anti-white and anti-Christian, seeing it as part of the “Great Replacement Theory” that they fear will lead to their eventual invisibility and loss of power.
The Trump administration also considers any topics or information not specifically focusing on whiteness, maleness, and Christianity (specifically Protestant Christianity) as automatically falling into the realm of DEI.
Under the direction of the Defense Secretary, former Fox host Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon scrubbed from its websites all articles focusing on DEI. Of the over 24,000 articles expunged, some included the military records of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who worked to integrate military squadrons. Others focused on information about U.S. troops who liberated Jewish prisoners from German concentration camps during the Second World War, while others included more recent commemorations of International Holocaust Awareness events.
They also purged informational maps of the African Americans buried in Arlington National Ceremony for people who wished to take a walking tour of the grounds.
Using the keyword “gay” in Pentagon search engines, they scrubbed all mentions of people who had “gay” in their names and even took down articles about the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. Pilot Paul Tibbets named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay.
And since his sycophants consider Trump as a biblical figure, of course he has the right, even the duty, to “reinterpret” historical and founding documents. Hardly a word of protest came from the right when Trump attempted to delete these words from the 14th amendment of the Constitution: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
Trump also flaunts the Constitution’s provisions of the separation of powers between the three co-equal branches of government by placing a heavy thumb on the scales of the legislative branch, by failing to spend funds as appropriated by Congress, and by openly defying orders from the judicial branch.
Trump is following the authoritarian playbook by revising history and altering foundational documents in his image.
Rewriting the Bible
Though raised in a religious Christian household, Adolf Hitler never considered himself a religious person, though he used religion as a stepping stone to power. He did not believe in most traditional Christian theories, such as the divinity of Jesus. Owing to his extreme antisemitism, he also disputed Jesus’ Jewish roots.
Presenting himself as the liberator of the German/Austrian homeland, many of his followers, as those of Trump, saw him as a mystical and almost religious figure. Many parents, teachers, and clergy expressed to German children that Hitler was sent from God.
The “German Christians” (Deutsche Christen) movement comprised approximately 30% of all German Protestants in the 1930s. They were theologically liberal Protestant churches but referred to Hitler as the “Führer Jesus.”
The German Christians’ Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben) worked to spread propaganda.
The institute’s founder and academic director was Walter Grundmann, Jena University Professor of the New Testament, who became the major force in the creation of the so-called “Nazi Bible.” Grundmann argued that the Bible must be restored to its pristine version, which meant that it needed to be scrubbed of its Jewish distortions of history.
He claimed that Protestants must overcome Judaism like Martin Luther overcame Catholicism.
The German newspaper, Bilt Zeitung, reported in 1939 that a group of Protestant theologians, loyal to the Nazi regime, established an organization for the “cleansing of Judaism from Christianity” (to “‘dejudaize” the Bible).
As a sign of the movement’s autocratic power grab undergirded by its all-consuming hatred of the Jews, German theologians rewrote the Jewish Bible (“Old Testament”) and the Christian (“New”) Testament by removing all mention of the Jews.
The original 10 Commandments expanded into 12 Commandments in the Nazi publication, the German Book of Faith:
1. Honor your Fuhrer and master.
2. Keep the blood pure and your honor holy.
3. Honor God and believe in him wholeheartedly.
4. Seek out the peace of God.
5. Avoid all hypocrisy.
6. Holy is your health and life.
7. Holy is your well-being and honor.
8. Holy is your truth and fidelity.
9. Honor your father and mother — your children are your aid and your example.
10. Maintain and multiply the heritage of your forefathers.
11. Be ready to help and forgive.
12. Joyously serve the people with work and sacrifice
It is quite telling that the Nazi creators of these commandments refused to include the divine injunctions against murder, theft, and covetousness during its continuing invasion, pillaging, and raping of Europe.
In the new edition of the Psalms, words of Jewish origin, such as “messiah,” “Jehovah” and “hallelujah,” were changed, and the city of Jerusalem was referred to as the “Eternal City of God” or “Eternity – The Divine City of Light.” The Nazis presented Jesus’ crucifixion as the result of a battle he fought against the Jews.
The Nazis transformed Jesus from the swarthy brown-skinned Jew to the perfect Aryan. According to the Nazis, Jesus’ ancestors originated in the Caucuses, and therefore, the savior could not have been Jewish. The 1940 edition of the Bible stated, “The Evangelical Jesus can only become the savior of our German people, because it does not incarnate the ideas of Judaism, but fights against them mercilessly.”
The aim of today’s anti-DEI movement is to “protect” the majority from what the right has painted as overly powerful and cunningly dangerous minorities.
We have seen this before.
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